Ali Hajimiri

California Institute of Technology

Ali Hajimiri is a pioneering integrated-circuits engineer at Caltech whose lab produced the phase-noise model for oscillators that is now universally used in RF circuit design, published in a landmark 1998 IEEE Journal paper. He co-founded a series of deep-tech spinouts from his group, including a phased-array-on-chip LiDAR technology that was acquired into the Waymo autonomous-vehicle sensor supply chain. His recent work on optical phased arrays and holographic displays on silicon photonics platforms has attracted DARPA and SpaceX interest for free-space optical communications between satellites. Hajimiri holds more than 85 US patents across RF, mm-wave, and optical domains and received the IEEE David Sarnoff Award. He is also notable for popular science communication through his YouTube channel on circuits and electromagnetics.